NLP or Natural Language Processing is among the most popular subsets of Artificial Intelligence today. It allows machines to communicate more effectively with each other, and is extensively used by businesses today for better RoI, customer retention, brand building, targeted marketing and more.

Today, companies are even diving deep into language-specific models, in a bid to obtain granular insights into customer preferences, market sentiments and brand requirements. Of the 1 billion + mobile users in India, 520 million are in rural areas – notably more comfortable conversing and transacting in vernacular languages than English.

Opportunities are abound in this area, and there are a number of startups honing their NLP capabilities to serve and cater a growing Internet-savvy population with myriad features. Let’s take a look at some of India’s top startups in the NLP space

Yellow Messenger:

Yellow Messenger’s proprietary natural language processing engine is pivotal to its meticulous conversational AI platform. Deep Learning models work well when there’s a vast dataset. They also suffer significantly with smaller datasets. This becomes a bigger problem with chatbots where the customer has limited data, the chatbot has several intents/journeys to detect and if customers are from different domains. This is where Yellow Messenger's NLP engine steps in – the proprietary NLP engine is highly efficient with the amount of data that the user provides. The engine is built from scratch by the company and is domain agnostic, and is fine tuned with data from across domains to provide as seamless an experience for clients. The NLP engine picks up patterns with every conversation, getting smarter over time. While developing the bot, the builder or developer doesn’t have to supply a lot of data. Right off the bat, the chatbot starts with an immense amount of accuracy and over time because of Yellow Messenger’s self-learning loop, the accuracy only increases. 

Listen to the interview with CEO Raghu Ravinutala on INDIAai's YouTube channel here

Saarthi.ai

Ranked by Markets&Markets as one of the major conversational AI vendors in India, Saarthi.ai is a Bangalore-based startup that delivers AI-powered customer engagement solutions. The startup is also one of the earliest players to automate customer queries in local languages. They got inducted into the Microsoft for Startups Program last year.

Gnani.ai

Gnani.ai, cofounded by Ananth Nagaraj and Ganesh Gopalan, has speech engines for 12+ major Indian languages, with conversational bots that act as the touchpoints in the democratization of the Internet. Gnani.ai has proprietary ASR and NLP engines, and has developed an On-Device voice models. Gnani.ai’s conversational AI platform offers customer automation and omnichannel analytics solutions to customers across BFSI, FMCG and healthcare among other sectors in 20+ languages globally. The company has recently entered a partnership with Samsung Ventures.

Read the story on INDIAai here

Niki.ai

Niki.ai bet big on Bharat even before the fad caught on. Founded in 2015 by Nitin Babel, Sachin Jaiswal, Shishir Modi and Keshav Prawasi, Niki.ai automates tasks like bill payments, travel and transport bookings, ordering items and more – in languages other than English, in voice and text formats. The startup has been funded by Ratan Tata and Unilazer Ventures.

Reverie Technologies

One of the company’s strengths to being able to deliver the meaning of one word in different dialects, making it an extremely versatile platform for use across the country and its diverse geographies. The cofounders Vivekananda and Arvind Pani have been on a mission since 2009 to build technologies to propagate the use of Indic languages in India, and promote language equality on the Internet

Dheeyantra Labs

Founded by Vidhu Bennie and Sreekumar Jairaj in 2017, Dheeyantra Labs is a multilingual AI/NLP platform allowing businesses to engage with users in native languages. They work with a range of clients in BFSI, manufacturing, retail and F&B.